Sunday, November 9, 2008

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama, elected president as an agent of change, is building his new team with old hands from the Clinton administration.

His first appointment, chief of staff, went to Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois representative and veteran of the last Democratic White House. Leading Obama's transition team is John Podesta, who was President Bill Clinton's chief of staff.

Obama's most dramatic step would be to name New York Senator Hillary Clinton, his defeated rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, as secretary of state. Two Obama advisers confirm the idea has been discussed, though they say they don't know how seriously the president-elect is considering it or whether Clinton would accept it.

Faced from day one with an economic crisis and two wars, Obama's campaign theme of changing the way Washington works is about to be overtaken by getting to work in Washington. For that, experience helps.

"Once you become president-elect, the rubber hits the road, and you're going to want to put people in positions of power who have a proven track record,'' says Chris Lehane, who was a special assistant counsel to Clinton.

The presence of Clinton-era advisers has drawn fire on blogs: from liberals who viewed the Clinton administration as too centrist and conservatives for whom the former president remains a favorite target.

The other risk for Obama is that his administration "can quickly look like the Clinton administration, now defined, by his campaign, as the status quo,'' says Julian Zelizer, a history and public-affairs professor at Princeton University in New Jersey.

We are moving!!!

There have been numerous revelations about Barack Obama's birth certificate and his selective service registration. Both appeared altered and raised questions as to their validity. Does this knowledge cause you to: (you may choose 2)

Liberals; Learning how They Think

In light of Sarah Palin's phenomenal popularity and potential to be an agent of change on a national level, what do you think she should do in the immediate future?

Barack Obama April 6, 2008 San Francisco, CA

“You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them,” Obama said. “And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Excerpt From "Dreams of my Father" by Barack Obama

In 1995, Obama's first autobiography is released. In it he writes of his years in college, associating with radicals. "To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk rock performance poets . . . When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated."

[Obama, Barack, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,Random House, Pages 100-101]

NRA: Vote Freedom First

"I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's, I loved it not just for the many comforts of life here. I loved it for its decency, for its faith in the wisdom, justice and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place, but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn't my own man anymore. I was my country's."